Update: Since this story originally published at 1PM on August 31, 2018, First Contact has issued two patches for Firewall Zero Hour. Patch notes for 1.01 indicate a focus on “General improvements for stability and performance” and notes for 1.02 indicate “various bug fixes.” It’s unclear if either or both patches are related to the issues communicated in today’s blog post down below, but it seems likely.
Original: According to a new blog post today from First Contact Entertainment, the Firewall Zero Hour developers are “currently working on” fixes for two major issues that have been hot topics with the community all week: squads getting split up during match making and host disconnect issues.
In the blog post, the developer explains that they’re “working on various bug fixes and improvements” to the game and specifically names those two issues. As it stands right now, if you make a squad with your friends and join public matchmaking, then there is a chance that your squad can get split up and assigned to opposite teams. Obviously that’s an issue. Private matches seem to work fine if you have a big enough group, but you can’t earn XP that way. It’s good to see this issue is top of mind since it literally hinders people from playing with friends.
The other most prominent networking issue facing the game this week has been frequent disconnect problems. As explained in the blog post:
“We currently use a peer-to-peer format, so please be aware that it is possible that quitting early may affect everyone else’s game. We are working on improved in-game messaging and a way to protect the loss of progression (crypto and XP) for players when this happens.”
Ideally we’d love to see the team adopt a dedicated server system instead since that will improve connection quality and prevent this issue, but at the very least establishing a host migration system so that even if the selected host leaves the matches can continue would be great.
Since the game just launched a mere few days ago, seeing the developer already directly address major concerns is a great sign. However, we don’t have any idea when these updates will be rolling out or what the specific roadmap for future plans looks like. There are still other issues with the game worth addressing as well, such as extended loading screens, the lack of a round system to cut back on downtime, and more.
All that being said, Firewall Zero Hour even in its current state is an excellent game and a must-have for all PSVR owners. This feels like a serious system seller and we praised the title in our review.
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